Abbas Daneshvari, Ph.D. California State University, Los Angeles

In
Victoria Kovalenchikova's paintings there are two worlds: the exterior and the
interior, the real and also the feelings read over it. Her paintings are
juxtapositions of abstractions and the figurative. Often the world of objects
is disturbed by levitated forms, abstract forms that in her capable hands may
well symbolize the emotional and the sensational energies of the world. In
these paintings feelings, emotions and the inscrutabilities of life have
tangibly and massively become present. The flesh is hidden beneath the force of
its energies and powers. In her paintings the transformation of the consensual
and the well adumbrated forms, through perilous amalgamations, make for
fantastic dimensions.

Measure
for measure the real is at the mercy of our sensations and perceptions. We see
the world through infinite prisms of powers that we can neither verbalize nor
reify objectively. The forms, in Kovalenchikova's hands, swiftly shift from the
realm of objects to their spheres of mysterious and the unknown. Not since
Georgio de Chirico has an artist been so capable of maintaining the objective
world and also transforming it through the infinite illusions that transcend
the reality of our myopic constructions of reality. A reality we often ignore
and refuse to acknowledge, lest we are surprised by the absence of order. The
existential metaphors of her paintings lay bare the infinite possibilities of
modalities and of inward realizations. Her painting "Autumn Wind" is
a peregrination into the energy and the hidden powers of forms, be these
energies innate or imported by the reader. "The Golden Day Triptych"
is a symphony of colors, astonishingly fertile in its emotional and
intellectual suggestions.

In
the above two paintings the emotional key to her work is the uncanny sense of
relating between abstraction and the figurative. Larry Rivers and Rauschenberg,
among many others, had coalesced the two, but never as a cohesive and unitary
phenomenon. In Kovalenchikova's paintings the amplitude of interior and the exterior
spaces suspend our logic and heighten ambiguities, gracefully and yet
restlessly; subtly and transparently. Her kind of abstraction exalts the
figurative and creates a spatial rapture. The figures are easy to read and yet
the poetic juxtaposition of the two evokes a profound sense of the sublime. The
genius of her paintings lie in the fact that these two antipodal worlds are
intimately familiar; like a strange dream and its dreamer.

In
"Autumn Wind" and "The Golden Day Triptych" the fiery
landscapes signal the end of ends and beginnings . The red and the inflamed
landscapes are furnaces of passions and awaken a sense of sempiternal energies.
The images and the forms are shaped by dreams and formulated by emotions. We
are at a loss for words caught by the phenomenal mystery of life, emotions and
all that lies beyond. Her images are partly concealed by their own extensions
and implications. The emotional or the abstract dissembles the figurative and
the objective and vice versa. We are driven upward, all the gravity is denied
and the colors cast are the atmosphere of visions. There is such abundance of
energies and such inquietude, all evoked by the imperatives of our visions.
They are in short illuminations and metaphysical spaces read from within and without.
They are divinely made and divinely destroyed.

"The Bridge", an ordinary and the
quotidian urban landscape, comes to life, almost forebodingly, through the
intrusions of abstract forms. This is also true of the "Seize the
Day" where her poetic melding of gestural acts is an electrifying source
of ambiguity and mystery.